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Cultural Marxism seems to be a subject that starts discussions here from time to time (this is the latest example, I guess), and one conclusion I came away with from these is that apparently many Blue Tribers are convinced that the concept is nothing but a neofascist myth, similar to how the same group dismisses "political correctness" as something not real and instead existing in nowhere else but the imagination of GOP propagandists.
Anyway, it's not like I want to reinvent the wheel here, but I propose a simple concept to differentiate cultural Marxism from economic Marxism. For the sake of argument, let's assume that both Marxist tendencies actually exist, although I understand that this is a very big jump for the leftists mentioned above. Instead of observing what these tendencies argue, let's look at how they find purchase in society, to the extent that they do.
Economic Marxism seeks supporters by appealing to the economic grievances of marginalized groups in predominantly right-wing hierarchical social environments.
"How is it possible that I'm working my ass off yet still remain nothing but a poor shmuck while assholes who never worked a day in their life drive around in fancy cars and fancy clothes?!"
"When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman? From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men." (John Ball)
It's not difficult to see why economic Marxism lost most of the allure it ever had: the people who keep appealing to such grievances are no longer the Marxists. This has multiple causes of its own, but I won't try going into this here.
Cultural Marxism, on the other hand, seeks supporters by appealing to the cultural grievances of marginalized groups in predominantly right-wing hierarchical social environments.
"Why is everyone in this town such a homophobic garbage Nazi shithead? I bet they'd start pelting me with rocks if I tried walking down Main Street holding hands with my BF."
"I'm from Alabama and my pal got thrown out of the house by his shitty Fundamentalist parents just for being gay and trans. Why is it such a cesspool, man?!"
"Everytime I visit family I get cold stares and they keep pestering me when am I finally getting married. I'm done with these fuckers."
"Why is it still considered normal here for shitbag rednecks to drive around flying the Confederate flag? I can't even."
So what do you call a movement that seeks supporters by appealing to the cultural grievances of marginalized groups in predominantly left-wing hierarchical social environments? Is it okay to also call them - presumably including you - "Cultural Marxists"? Is the entire Online Right, as represented on this forum, a Cultural Marxist movement, or is the term reserved for those who fight against a right-wing environment? That seems like it's pretty close to @Primaprimaprima's observation below that part of the motivation is simply to be able to say that opponents of right-wingers = Marxists.
And then, who even gets to define what is right-wing? What do you tell to people like me whose political compass is rotated just enough that the SJW establishment looks like a right-wing movement with a new coat of paint, simply having gone through the usual evolution where a left-wing movement (ex. early Christianity) overthrows a right-wing establishment (ex. the pagan Roman aristocracy) and proceeds to become the new right-wing establishment (ex. the papacy) itself? Now you have to refine your definition to say "no, Marxists is the proper term for whatever instance of this general dynamic my tribe is fighting against", which looks increasingly contrived.
In general, I think it is right to be suspicious of people who insist on using a particular preexisting term for some politically significant notion at all costs, because this is the central element of a widely deployed manipulation strategy to redirect people's intuitions, heuristics and rules that were built up in response to one thing to be aimed towards another. This is what is going on when SJWs insist that you use their definition of "racism" (and relegate portions that were in the old extension but are excluded from the new to the semantic ghetto of "reverse racism"), instead of going the least-resistance path of coming up with a fresh word to capture the exact set of tendencies that they want to suppress, or "fascism", and why the content industry is adamant about referring to copyright violations as "theft" and "piracy", and I'm sure you could come up with many other examples. This is notwithstanding the other extreme, pointed out by @ArjinFerman, where one side is denied the use of any term for a politically significant notion at all - but the answer to a trap being laid in front of you isn't to defiantly turn around and walk into the trap laid behind you.
Of course, "Cultural Marxism" is an interesting example, because part of the intended transference seems to go the other way - the insistent advocate hopes that by being convinced that he is fighting against "Cultural Marxism", the anti-SJW will in the future also take up the torch of the fight against plain (economic) Marxism. I can't think of many good examples of this from other sides, since it requires a degree of having lost but still being around to plot a comeback; perhaps old-school economic lefties should pick up the strategy and push the idea that newspapers, Hollywood etc. are just "cultural Big Oil" that pulls the same tactic of using US foreign policy might to gain access to new markets.
The problem with this transference is not just that it is manipulative, but also that as soon as it is recognised, you lose a big part of your potential coalition, namely all the people (me included) who think that (economic) Marxism isn't particularly good, but the movements that fight against Marxism or think that we directionally need less Marxism are strictly worse. I would like to fight against SJWs, and in fact I consider it very important to do so, but I would be very reluctant to make common cause with a movement that wants to take some or all of my energy to do that and redirect it towards reducing taxes, abolish mandatory healthcare, or give more of a political voice to the wealthy.
Sovereign is he who defines the exception, or so it is said.
Then what is, exactly, the strength of the person who is allowed to make the definitions?
Let me short-circuit the definitional arguments: imagine that we are gesturing at a horse... and I call it a horse. No, some obnoxious college activist emerges, it is a four-legged ruminant ungulate!
Okay, I concede. It's a four-legged ruminant ungulate (bad). We take a step forward on the euphemistic threadmill.
You horrible, horrible person! The college activist says. It's actually an equine monodactyl animal of herding!
And so on. At no point is the discussion is allowed to proceed beyond what identifying the horse is.
Cultural Marxism is identifiably so because it uses the oppressor/oppressed dynamic but replaces the class structure with a whole assortment of intersectional replacements. No, it is not orthodox Marxism. But it very succinctly describes what it is. You are falling for a psy-op, a plausible smokescreen of academic confusion. Strip out decades of cold warrior rhetoric and it is still an accurate description of what they're trying to get at.
There is no distinction between cultural and economic marxism in the end because it all leads to redistribution of wealth from oppressor to oppressed. If you don't recognize that basic fact, you don't really want to fight the SJWs at all: merely moderate their excesses.
I know you are trying to quote Moldbug here, but that's neither the exact quote nor is it a particularly deep insight. The "sovereign" gets to write your dictionary, so He actually defines everything.
What upstart movement can not be glossed as saying that some group is not getting what it deserves and some other group is getting more than it deserves? If this is the definition of Marxism, then the Nazis, the Basque and Catalan independence movement, the Kievan Rus throwing off the Mongol yoke and the American Revolution are all Marxist. Why don't you call it Cultural Patriotism, or Cultural ETAism? This analysis is not predictive of anything either, because it is not a feature of "cultural marxist" SJWs that who they want redistribute wealth from and to has anything to do with who is oppressing whom. No amount of oppression heaped on their political opponents would make them think "huh, I recall that we were Marxists and must pursue the redistribution of wealth from oppressor to oppressed" and proceed to expropriate their allies to pay their enemies.
What exactly is the psy-op I am supposedly falling for? I don't think I'm particularly confused about what SJWs want, or what Marxists want, or what anti-Marxists want, and I'm strongly against the first, mildly against the second, and strongly against the third. If your rhetorical trick made me support the third because I wanted to oppose the first, you would be the one psyopping me. You might be trying to frame things as if there were a contradiction in my position, but your argument only works if you consider "oppressed" and "oppressor" to be pointers that must not be resolved or refined, which as I argued above not even the SJWs do. I want some redistribution from rich to poor, and no redistribution between any ethnic groups, and this is independent of who oppresses whom: even if the rich were publicly flagellated and forced to eat dirt for two hours every day while the homeless get to spit on them, I would still want them to pay more taxes.
I really don't want to get into definitional arguments, because they don't get anywhere.
I am using their terminology. You can argue it as much as you want that it is vague and nebulous, but it doesn't matter, because it describes a real subset of people that do exist that push policy and active goals. I don't have to go back to the Kievan Rus to explain it. What am I, Putin?
Don't dive into generalities. I am addressing a very specific movement (the woke, the intersectionalists, the crt) who can be described as cultural marxists. I am intentionally limiting the scope of the discussion here because there is where an argument can actually be had.
But if you want to continue down this path, please, provide your definitions of these things.
Who are "they"? The vast majority of people you seek to describe as "Cultural Marxists" do not use that terminology for themselves. There apparently existed some group of people who used that term once upon a time, and maybe you can still find one or another stray adherent, but it's not clear why it would even still be popular given that the typical SJW is hustling for a seat at the table of the megacorps and passive-income fatcats.
The definitions are not that hard.
Marxists are adherents of Marx's theories and visions for society and economics, who believe that the principal division in society is between people who own property that generates value and those who have to sell their labour to provide for themselves, and it is inevitable that the latter will rise up and bring about a new form of society where the former mode of existence is impossible and the latter retain control over the property complement that is needed to convert their labour into value.
"Cultural Marxists" are not really a thing anymore; to the extent to which people identified with this, this can be compared to the tendency of metal music fans to create new "types of metal" whenever they stumble upon a non-metal music genre that they like, so folk music as enjoyed by the metal community is "folk metal", J-pop enjoyed by Metal fans is "kawaii metal" and so on. "Cultural Marxism" is a label that emerges when people whose identity revolves around being "Marxist" discover their interest in culture warring, and have to lay claim to still being part of their old community.
The people currently controlling culture in the US and its vassals can be called SJWs, Wokeists or the Awokened or whatever you prefer. I found that in my life calling them "the Social Justice crowd" is specific and inoffensive enough that it gets the point across without eliciting backlash.
Someone who doesn't identify as a Marxist can't be a Cultural Marxist, any more than a folk music fan who is not into metal music or culture can be a folk metal fan. What you are doing amounts to relabelling all folk music fans as folk metallers, because you hate both metal and folk music and during the most recent resurgence of folk music there happened to be a group of metalheads who got into it.
As I said in my reply to OP, the term “cultural Marxist” refers to a specific umbrella of ideas, originated and promulgated by individuals who explicitly self-identified as Marxists, and who applied Marxist analysis and praxis to issues of cultural/social inequality. These people mostly called, and still do call, themselves critical theorists. Do you agree that this is a discrete and identifiable phenomenon or not? If you do, what is the point of quibbling about the term “Cultural Marxism”? Your concern clearly isn’t that you don’t want to use an exonym for this group, because you yourself call them “SJWs” and “the Social Justice crowd” - terms that these people clearly do not use amongst themselves.
Marx himself made it very clear that he believed that capitalism was a necessary step on the way to communism. One of the first major wrinkles in Marxism that caused a lot of consternation and soul-searching in the movement is the fact that the only country where communism had securely taken hold before WWII was Russia - at the time a non-industrialized semi-feudal state that had not yet undergone most of the preliminary steps that would have allowed capitalism to first take root and then expose its own contradictions. Marx himself expected communism to flourish first in countries like the UK and Germany, where the Industrial Revolution was the most pervasive and capitalism strongest.
Modern Marxists have developed corporatist theories of how 21st-century Marxism will necessarily be achieved. They’ve given up on the short-term goal of expropriating industrialists and shifted their focus to working within the existing framework of monopoly capitalism; many of them welcome a paradigm in which megacorps crush smaller companies and centralize the means of production among an ever-smaller group of nearly state-adjacent entities, because it makes it that much easier to infiltrate those organizations and direct them toward ideological ends. Public-private partnerships are the new Marxist paradigm.
Again, have you actually read any of the works of the figures I and others are identifying as Cultural Marxists? If you were to read their works and see that they do actually identify as Marxists, and offer sophisticated explanations of how their work furthers Marxist ends, would that change your mind?
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